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The garbage bin that’s better than smart

June 6, 201612:58Stuart Corner

Korean startup Ecube Labs has come up with a garbage bin that not only signals when it’s full, but delays that event by compacting its contents: all on solar power.

The company has had pilot installations at Changi airport in Singapore, Seoul city, and the city of Roermond in the Netherlands. It exhibited its products in Australia in May this year, at Waste 2016 in Coffs Harbour and will be back again in October for Waste Expo in Melbourne.

Ecube Labs’ online marketing manager, Matti Juutinen, told IoTAustralia that the company did not presently have any customers or distributors in Australia but was hoping to get some pilot installations in the near future.

He claimed that Ecube’s solar-powered waste compacting bin could hold up to eight times more trash than traditional bins, and combined with the company’s integrated waste management solution could reduce the operational costs of waste collections by up to 80 percent.

“We are the only company in the industry to offer an ultrasonic fill-level sensor (with 10 years battery life) and a smart solar-powered waste compacting bin on a single real-time monitoring platform that generates optimised schedules and routes based on fill-level forecasting,” Juutinen said.

He said the compactor could operate for two to three weeks without sunlight once fully-charged and that it could be fully-charged over three to four days with about four hours of sunlight per day.

The company’s Clean Cube compactor is not a trash bin in itself, but rather is designed to hold standard wheelie bins. It comes in sizes to cater for 120 and 240 litre bins. Clean Cap is a solar-powered ultrasonic fill level sensor designed for installation on a range of trash containers. Both products communicate over cellular networks.

They are complemented by Clean City Networks, the company’s cloud based system for monitoring and reporting on the state of its bins. Clean City Networks also provides authorities and garbage collectors with optimised routing information for bin-emptying based on the location and fill state of bins.